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The Web's crown prince of social media has an uncanny knack for churning out posts that eat up the Internet. One week ago, BuzzFeed's Jack Shepherd pressed the publish button on "21 Pictures That Will Restore Your Faith in Humanity," an undeniably faith-restoring collection of inspiring pictures that I read and shared, along with more than 7 million other people.

Kudos to Facebook (with some help from Twitter and MySpace) for having the balls to do this. It&#8217;s a bookmarklet that replaces Google&#8217;s new &#8220;People and Pages&#8221; area, the hardcoded social search area, and the search completion drop-down, with organic results. In other words, it makes the new Google behave more like the old Google.

Back in my broadcast.com days we had a saying that "bits are bits". That once content becomes digital, it is naturally going to become available on any and all digital devices. Based on this, we always made the point to be platform and device agnostic.

8220;Golden ages&#8221; in sports are weird things. They&#8217;re usually only declared after the fact — and often well after the fact. It&#8217;s often the &#8220;too far in the forest to see the trees&#8221; syndrome mixed with a lack of historical context, so perspective is lacking until further down the line. But that&#8217;s not the case with men&#8217;s tennis right now.

At first, Danny Sullivan&#8217;s post made it seem as if Google was killing off OpenSocial, the initiative launched several years ago in the face of Facebook&#8217;s Platform/Graph. But Google clearly didn&#8217;t like that too much, so they clarified with Sullivan that only the Social Graph API was closing.

Nelson Minar&#8217;s thoughts on the recent Google issues succinctly capture what many other Googlers (both past and present) have been expressing privately in recent weeks. His main point: I imagine half of my readers are smugly thinking &#8220;See, I told you Google was evil all along&#8221;. I don&#8217;t think that&#8217;s right.

How much better would social search be if Google surfaced results from all across the web? The results speak for themselves. We created a tool that uses Google's own relevance measure-the ranking of their organic search results-to determine what social content should appear in the areas where Google+ results are currently hardcoded.

January 24, 2012 at 10:01 am PT Yesterday, before he jetted off for a glam trip to the tony World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Fortune magazine's Adam Lashinsky met me at San Francisco International Airport to talk about his new book, "Inside Apple: How America's Most Admired - and Secretive - Company Really Works."

January 31, 2012 at 2:41 pm PT According to several sources close to the situation, the Facebook board has been meeting early this afternoon at its Silicon Valley HQ to give the go-ahead to a massive initial public offering.

Following this morning's launch of iBooks Author, there's a growing rumble of anger over a term in the software's End User Licence Agreement (EULA) which restricts how resulting ebooks can be sold. Books produced by iBooks Author can be distributed for free on any platform, but can only be sold outside the iBooks store by entering into a financial arrangement with Apple.

Looking around the Web today, there's been a mixture of we-killed-SOPA high-fiving and crestfallen realism that the bill isn't really dead. As long as there are movie studios and lobbyists, it'll just pop up in another form like some horrible game of whack-a-mole. So Y Combinator's Paul Graham has a solution: Just kill Hollywood.

Thanks to Twitter's early(-ish) scaling problems, there are few more recognizable images of web 2.0 than the Fail Whale. But what's less well known is how the iconic graphic came in to being. Or indeed how close it came to being the Fail Elephant.

As a young CEO of a growing company, I find that the most valuable insight I'm gaining these days has been from other CEOs. Certainly this realization isn't revolutionary - YPO, EO, Mindshare and a host of other organizations are set up just for this kind of knowledge exchange.

It had to happen sooner or later. Paul Carr had to get something about the startup business right. He's been saying for years that books and publishing was going to get sexy again- and not just for wonks like us who write books and naturally care about the fortunes of the boutique industry.